Ok, its stuff like this that’s a real knock against linux being ready for the desktop. Since I’ve upgraded gnome recently, automounting of usb devices has stopped working. This is annoying, although livable. Today I found a fix, if you’re running debian with gnome and gnome-volume-manager still doesn’t display usb drives on your desktop when you connect, make sure that /usr/bin/pmount-hal is set suid root:
chmod u+s /usr/bin/pmount-hal